Archive for the ‘Best Argument for Gun Regulation’ Category

Last year, Kory Watkins, president of Texas’ Open Carry Tarrant County, exhorted followers to converge on Washington D.C. and “take over the city, arrest the bankers, crooked politicians and restore liberty here in our country.” Photos showed him posing with gun advocate Veronica Dunnachie charged with shooting and killing her ex-husband and stepdaughter in December. Nice. Now he has amped up his rhetoric. Politicians who block open carry of pistols without any licensing requirements in Texas commit “treason” he says on Facebook which is “punishable by death.” What??

Death Threats From Gun Advocates–it is the Best Argument For Gun Regulation:

Join our action to tell corporate America to get off the “sidelines” and take a stand against gun violence including the “can’t miss” sniper rifle sold to civilians. When corporations want sane gun laws, we will have sane gun laws.

Marcus Dee loved Nadia Ezaldein his sister told the press today. But he also had a “temper.” A law-abiding citizen, legal gun owner at one time and son of Chicago police officers , Dee became angry while armed and killed Ezaldein at Nordstrom’s on Chicago’s Michigan Ave on Black Friday. Dee not only threatened Ezaldein with a gun before, another woman sought an order of protection against him in 2007. Still, the NRA works to allow people to keep their guns while they are under orders of protection. Violent domestic abusers have gun rights–it says so in the Constitution!

Law-abiding boyfriends who kill when they get mad–it is why gun violence is a women’s issue.

Join our action to tell corporate America to get off the “sidelines” and take a stand against gun violence including the “can’t miss” sniper rifle sold to civilians. When corporations want sane gun laws, we will have sane gun laws.

Ted Nugent’s inflammatory, racist rhetoric is not new. This week he called for the “evil carcasses” of President Obama, Sen. Durbin and “Pilosi” and “Bloomburgh.” What? The death threats are NRA-approved because Nugent is a long standing NRAboard member.

And the NRA supported more insurrection talk this week on NRA News. Maryland’s Wicomico County Sheriff Mike Lewis said, “As long as I’m the sheriff in this county, I will not allow the federal government to come in here and strip my citizens of their right to bear arms. I can tell you this, if they attempt to do that, it would be an all-out civil war, no question about it,” and that was just fine with the NRA.

Armed gun advocates threatening government officials. It’s the Best Argument for Gun Regulation.

Join our action to tell corporate America to get off the gun violence “sidelines” and take a stand against “can’t miss” sniper weapons sold to civilians. When corporations want sane gun laws, we will have sane gun laws.

After a suspect killed 6 and injured 13 in Santa Barbara in May despite his family’s warnings, California lawmakers drafted a bill empowering family members and police to seek “gun violence restraining orders” that would disarm people at risk of violent crimes before the bloodshed. But in August, members of gun groups, Oath Keepers, tea party groups and the John Birch Society opposed the measure. Carrying signs reading “Don’t grab our guns” and “Honk for our rights,” demonstrators, mostly men, defended the rights of violent offenders to keep and use their guns. “Where does it stop?” asked John Woodard, of Adelanto, a member of the NRA, echoing the familiar “persecution” theme of the gun lobby.

Gun rights trump violence and a few dead bodies? It’s the Best Argument for Gun Regulation.

Tell corporate America to get off the gun violence “sidelines” and take a stand against gun violence. Join our action against Hallmark, the only major corporation that has publicly sworn it will never support anti-gun initiatives. When corporations want sane gun laws, we will have sane gun laws.

People who work against gun violence get many love letters from gun advocates.”You Are a bunch of useful [sic] idiots. If this once great nation succumbs to your propaganda you will see mass murder on a scale you can’t imagine. God have mercy on your souls,” said one we recently received. “Your [sic] not a ducking victim, your [sic] a survivor……and your [sic] all idiots….. Go shoot yourselves,” said a second well wisher.

While many a baseball fan has yelled, “Kill The Umpire,” threats from snarly, combative bullies who HAPPEN TO BE ARMED are the Best Argument for Gun Regulation.

NGVAC is the largest US gun victims organization and advocates the use of an economic lever to drive sane gun laws. Join our boycott against Hallmark cards. Sign up to receive emails now.

We will stop referring to ourselves as a “civil rights” organization that defends “human rights.” It is a sacrilege to people actually killed or harmed by civil and human rights abuses.

We will stop blaming gun crime on “failure to enforce existing laws” and confess that it is our lobbying that has blocked sharing and computerizing of national firearm sales data so crimes cannot be solved. We also block weapon microstamping, further making sure the “bad guys” never get caught.

We admit that arming bad guys through such loose laws and then blaming armed “bad guys” for the need for more firearms is like killing your parents and crying you are an orphan.

We will stop our obstruction of “one firearm a month” laws to stop straw buyers. Convicted grandmother-killer William Spengler used a straw buyer at Gander Mountain in Henrietta, NY to get the weapons he used to kill firefighters last Christmas Eve. Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold also used a straw buyer.

We will admit our contention that criminals will target homes because they believe there are no firearms or because they believe there are firearms is nonsensical. We will further admit that asking the same jack booted government we rail against to protect our identities so our neighbors don’t know about our firearms is contradictory and sniveling.

We will stop pretending our fear to go anywhere unarmed is somehow a public service and that we cop wannabes are the real law enforcers. We will admit our carrying does not protect others or ourselves and take a hard look at all the people–including elderly and 80 pound women–who go the same places we are afraid to go without weapons.

We will stop whipping up “preppers” and citizen army extremists into stockpiling bigger arsenals because jack booted government agents are about to storm their homes and disarm them. Though we love the melodrama of being “victims,” the 2008 Supreme Court decision District of Columbia v. Heller means that will never happen. Never. And if we are victims, we’re the best armed victims in the history of the world.

We will stop our compulsive firearms talk about clips, magazines and how a semiautomatic weapon shouldn’t be considered an assault weapon. Though the blather is designed to reveal how the public is too ignorant about firearms to understand laws, the truth is we get buzzed just talking about weapons. Yes, it’s a fetish.

Finally, we will retire our shopworn “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” slogan and our mantra that gun laws won’t stop the bad guys and mentally disturbed people. Mentally ill people are everywhere, like a man in China who attacked over 20 school children on the same day as the Sandy Hook massacre. Because he had a knife and not a rapid fire weapon, the children did not die and 40 parents in China still have their loved ones. Unlike in Newtown.

There are many mentally ill people out there with delusional fantasies. Unfortunately some of them are gun advocates. Evelyn Johnson of Hurst, Texas provides this month’s best argument for gun regulation. She wrote this message on the National Gun Victims Action Council facebook page on Christmas Eve.

“youer all dam commie idiots moved to europe if u dont like it here go to hell ur not getting our guns !!! whisleblower tells real reason for gun control obama has made promise to China to give them our land an resources, China wants our guns so we will not raise up against what obama is doing to pay them for the f–g debt they caused u idiots!!!!!!!! wake up u have caused ebough sh-t on lies already”

Angry, delusion and armed? The best argument for gun regulation!

Are you DONE ASKING for sane gun laws? Force them! Join the thousands making the TTELL AND COMPEL™ pledge.

The gun lobby loves the short memory of the American public and the news media.

Who remembers that Aaron Alexis killed 12 at Washington’s Navy Yard just three months ago, legally buying a shotgun two days before the rampage? Who remembers that Paul Ciancia allegedly killed a TSA agent at the Los Angeles airport last month? With a .223-caliber assault rifle police say was legally obtained? (Let’s “enforce existing laws” as the NRA says!) Who remembers that a year earlier another TSA agent was killed at the Cleveland Hopkins International Airport? Murdered by an enraged husband whose “rights” to keep arms while an under order of protection the NRA protects?

No, time flies when there are sick and preventable shootings every day. And that’s just fine with the NRA’s toady politicians who enacted no legislation after 20 first-graders and six adults perished in Newtown, CT and one of their own, Rep. Gabby Giffords (R-AZ), was shot by a legal gun owner and concealed carrier. Hey, these things happen.

Historically, shocking massacres have almost never dislodged lawmakers from their eerie and lethal fealty to the gun lobby–and sometimes they have actually led to loosened laws! Weeks after Jeffrey Weise killed 11 on the Red Lake reservation and Terry Michael Ratzmann killed nine at a Wisconsin church service, Congress passed the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act granting immunity to gun manufacturers from all lawsuits. Thanks, Congress!

After the murders of two Oakland and three Pittsburgh police officers within two weeks of each other in 2009 (the latter by a legal gun owner) and several Miami police officers, the NRA maintained its opposition to laws banning armor-piercing “cop killer” bullets. They are a “sneaky” way to outlaw other weapons, said the lobby which is pledged to increase gun manufacturers’ sales. In fact, in its acceptance of police murders and its hatred of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and federal “jack-booted thugs,” it’s hard to tell the NRA from the bad guy-criminals it hates.

During the spring of 2009 when gun rampages killed 13 in Binghamton, NY, 10 in Alabama (by a gun “collector”), 8 at a Carthage, NC nursing home, 6 in Santa Clara, 5 in Miami in addition to the 5 Oakland and Pittsburgh police officers, the NRA told lawmakers they shouldn’t legislate “on the fresh graves of tragedy”–and they didn’t! Lawmakers pretended the 47 people had died from ice storms or other unpreventable events.

The NRA’s lackey politicians are glad the public’s forgotten about the church, mall, school, airport, traffic and domestic violence shootings this year and last. That means they don’t have to enact laws protecting public safety like they have with second-hand smoke, drunk driving, helmets, seat belts and even contaminated food. They can quietly continue to serve their real constituency–the gun manufacturers and the hired guns lobbying for them.

Are you DONE ASKING for sane gun laws? Force them! Join the thousands making the TELL AND COMPEL™ pledge.

Many are horrified by news of a Philadelphia “rat” website that exposes to retaliation crime witnesses who help police. “Post some new rats,” one avenger wrote, “I needa put a hit out on them.”

Yet just as chilling are gun advocates savaging their own for appearing to cooperate with the other side.

This month, a simple plea for mandatory gun-owner training in the magazine Guns & Ammo led to the firing of the contributing editor, Dick Metcalf, and the resignation of the magazine’s editor, Jim Bequette.

According to the National Rifle Association’s paranoid absolutism, gun training is the first step toward confiscation. So are universal background checks, limitations on large-capacity magazines, limiting gun purchases to one a month and requiring the reporting of lost or stolen guns.

Confiscation paranoia is why the results of the National Instant Criminal Background Check System must, by law, be destroyed within 24 hours by firearms dealers. Like many paranoid laws the gun lobby has gotten on the books, these are unabashed gifts to straw buyers and other criminals.

This is not the first time gun advocates have taught one of their own a lesson. A few years ago, the top firearms and hunting commentator, Jim Zumbo, dared to suggest that AR and AK rifles had “no place … among our hunting fraternity.” Hunters have always been proud to use “sporting firearms,” not assault rifles and should resist being “lumped into the group of people who terrorize the world with them,” he wrote.

Calls for Mr. Zumbo’s head on a mount were swift and merciless. He was dropped by Remington Arms, Gerber Knives, Mossy Oak and Outdoor Life and temporarily dropped by the Outdoor Channel. He was reinstated only after a re-education trip to the ranch of NRA member Ted Nugent to learn appreciation for so-called black rifles for killing prairie dogs and other animals.

As the CEO of the National Gun Victims Action Council, I have seen the retaliatory wrath of gun rights avengers turned against my own organization. An informative piece called “My Month With a Gun,” written by council board member Heidi Yewman, was driven off the Ms. magazine website by threats and aggressive responses this past summer. Amazon ratings of a book by council senior editor Martha Rosenberg were sabotaged by gun advocates this summer. The quick tempers of many gun lovers and their desire to “shoot first and ask questions later” are one of the biggest arguments for better gun regulations.

Some gun advocates may be loud, threatening and tenacious but their numbers are minuscule. Polls consistently show extremists number only 1 million versus 100 million Americans who desire sane gun laws. Starbucks’ disavowal of guns in September and the defeat of pro-gun Virginia gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli this month suggest how small the gun extremist numbers are.

Gun and outdoor magazines may have to cave to angry gun advocates but Starbucks doesn’t. And it’s now feeling pressure from those who seek reasonable gun control. The National Gun Victims Action Council, the Episcopal Peace Fellowship and the Fellowship of Reconciliation launched a boycott against Starbucks last year and it worked.

It is time for Americans fed up with blood in the streets, courtesy of the gun lobby, to stop saying “please” to politicians who haven’t passed one meaningful federal gun regulation in 19 years. From Mahatma Gandhi’s salt march in the 1930s to the Montgomery bus boycott in the 1960s, successful social movements need an economic vehicle to convey the will of the majority when lawmakers aren’t listening.

This is why the action council and supporting groups urge the 14 million Americans affected by gun violence to use their buying power to influence gun-friendly corporations, services, lawmakers and even states with our “Tell and Compel” pledge. Starbucks’ disavowal of guns is just the first example of our collective power.

Elliot Fineman is the CEO of NGVAC
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Are you DONE ASKING for sane gun laws? Force them! Join the thousands making the TELL AND COMPEL™ pledge

Gun extremists often harbor a sense of persecution and actually claim their “rights” are violated by gun-free zones (like schools) and home rule laws. (NRA board member Ted Nugent says George Zimmerman should sue Trayvon Martin's parents.) So, it is no surprise that the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), amazingly based in Newtown, feels persecuted by the nation's attention to gun violence. Even as its contributions have quadrupled, helped by a Las Vegas casino conglomerate and Kook-Jin Justin Moon, son of the Unification Church's founder, who owns Kahr Arms, the NSSF thinks it's being dissed. “We are displeased by the comments of the governor towards our industry, for which he has online casino refused to apologize,” says NSSF senior vice president Lawrence Keane. Shouldn't the apology be the other way around?

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Are you DONE ASKING for sane gun laws? Force them! Join the thousands making the TELL AND COMPEL™ pledge.

Don’t miss NGAC’s new features

Tuesday of first week of the month: Beware the Law-Abiding Citizen

Wednesdays: NRA Puppet of the Week

Tuesday of the last week of the month: Best Argument for Gun Regulation; the comments of gun fanatics